Episode 2

The second episode begins with the worst news in the series. A police officer tells Amanda Kinsella that her son Jamie is dead; she drives recklessly to the scene and pleads to see the body, and Jimmy stops her, telling her she does not want to remember Jamie in that condition, and holds her while she sobs. At the hospital Frank learns that Eric is in surgery, and Nikita tells him the doctors believe Eric will survive. Frank vows to find out why the gunmen opened fire on Eric and Jamie.

Word reaches the family that Caolán Moore is behind the shooting over his feud with Eric. Frank asks Dotser to arrange a meeting with Eamon, who agrees to talk and has him driven to a car park where Caolán is waiting. Eamon accuses Eric of shooting one of Caolán's friends; Frank denies Eric was involved. Caolán gives Frank a bag of money for Jimmy, about 150,000 euro as compensation. Eamon says Eric's shooting was his own fault but Jamie's death was a mistake, and warns Frank before leaving him there. Jimmy urinates in the bag and tells Frank to return it. Birdy supports Frank's wish to keep the peace; Amanda wants blood.

Michael is torn between the family he wants to leave and the one he cannot. Jimmy asks him to help avenge Jamie and reminds him he has killed for money before. A custody solicitor tells Michael that getting access to Anna depends on staying out of trouble, and Amanda warns him not to interfere in Anna's life. Anna walks to Michael's flat, then leaves without knocking, and tells her guardian she has had no contact with him. Amanda, taunting herself at a red light, rams the car in front. Frank confronts Eric at the hospital over the drive-by, and Eric says Caolán deserved it; Frank orders him to say nothing to Jimmy or Birdy. Amanda restricts Jamie's funeral to family and close friends, which would exclude Kem and Fudge, and Jimmy objects.

The closing reveal is the fact on which the rest of the season turns. In the last minutes the episode discloses that Jamie was Michael's biological son, not Jimmy's, the result of an affair between Michael and Amanda. The sources differ on when the series states the paternity plainly, but the disclosure attached to Michael's decision to kill is what gives his motive its charge: he agrees to help Jimmy take revenge and looks resigned to what is coming.

The ending is the episode's best decision. Putting the paternity fact at the moment Michael agrees to kill for a boy he has only just learned is his changes the meaning of everything after it without a flashback. The weakness is the pace: the series' own champion at the Irish Times called the hour brooding to the point of monotony, more Plodfather than Godfather, and short of the cranked-up energy some viewers might have wanted.

What distinguishes it is the compensation bag. Making the trigger for Jimmy's defiance a sack of hush money is a domestic, transactional way to stage a gangland war. It is also the episode where Amanda and Michael are defined as the show's centre, and where Amanda's grief first turns into strategy.